KYIV -- They share a common enemy in Russian President Vladimir Putin, who unleashed an invasion that has killed tens of thousands of people in Ukraine and is jailing opponents, curtailing freedoms, and crushing dissent at home.
But more than a year after Moscow’s large-scale offensive began, massively escalating a war that broke out almost a decade ago in the Donbas, many Ukrainians are distrustful and dismissive of the Russian opposition -- and particularly of Putin's most prominent foe, Aleksei Navalny.
Nothing illustrates this more starkly than the outrage caused by the Oscar that a documentary -- eponymously titled Navalny -- tracking the now-imprisoned politician and anti-corruption campaigner as he recovered from a near-fatal August 2020 nerve-agent poisoning he blames on Putin won at the Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood on March 12.
For many in the United States and the West, this year's award for Best Documentary Feature Film was precisely a rebuke of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. During his acceptance speech, the documentary's Canadian-born director, Daniel Roher, said Navalny is being punished "for what he calls…Vladimir Putin’s unjust war of aggression in Ukraine."
But to numerous Ukrainians -- from President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's top adviser to journalists, activists, and people on social media and on the street -- Hollywood's lauding of the Navalny film was at best ignorant and naive and at worst a whitewash, disrespectful and detrimental to their struggle against Russia's armed campaign to subjugate their nation.
There were several factors fueling this animus over the award, some of them stemming from wariness of the Russian opposition more broadly and some linked closely to the controversial figure of Navalny, who has come under scrutiny around the world for past statements seen as racist and xenophobic and in Ukraine in particular for his remarks about Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that Russia occupied and seized in 2014.
Among some Ukrainians, comments Navalny has made in the past have led to suspicion that he is cut from the same cloth as Putin, who has suggested Ukraine is not a real nation and can only exist as part of a Moscow-dominated "Russian world."
The Smell Of Russian Propaganda
"Navalny is a sandwich packed in a lunchbox and carried around the world as evidence that there is still an opposition in Russia," Andriy Sadoviy, the outspoken mayor of the western city of Lviv, wrote on Twitter the day after the Academy Awards ceremony. The Oscar statuette, he suggested, now "reeks of Russian propaganda."
Sadoviy was referring to comments Navalny made in a radio interview in 2014, when he said that Moscow had seized Crimea through "egregious violations of all international regulations" but predicted the peninsula would long remain a de facto part of Russia and would not be returned to Ukraine "in the foreseeable future."
He sarcastically asked the interviewer if Crimea was a "a salami sandwich to be handed back and forth."
Since then, his supporters point out, Navalny has changed his public stance on Crimea and called on Moscow to respect the internationally recognized borders of Ukraine. Last month, he issued a 15-point statement condemning the "unjust war of aggression" that he said Putin "unleashed...under ridiculous pretexts," and called on Russia to "stop the aggression, end the war, and withdraw all of its troops from Ukraine."
Many Ukrainians remain unconvinced, though, and point to his participation in ultra-nationalist marches in Russia in the 2000s and his support for Russia's 2008 aggression against Georgia, for which he has since apologized. He has not apologized for past statements that critics say were racist and that have contributed to suspicions in Ukraine and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union that he is a Russian chauvinist whose policies on the region, if he ever came to power, would differ little from Putin's.
"Navalny earned his Oscar because he played a Russian opposition figure perfectly," Ukrainian stand-up comedian Anton Tymoshenko joked recently, in a succinct expression of the widespread conviction the Kremlin and its opponents are two sides of the same coin.
For some, this impression has been deepened by signs of links between the opposition and tycoons who are widely seen as part of Putin's system even if they have not vocally supported the Kremlin or the invasion of Ukraine.
Case in point: The scandal that erupted this month after Leonid Volkov, a top associate of Navalny, suspended his political and public activities after he first denied signing a letter arguing for lifting European Union sanctions on some London-based Russian tycoons, only to later admit that he had. In Ukraine, these developments have added to questions about the Russian opposition's allegiances.
Even before the large-scale invasion last year, there was widespread doubt in Ukraine about Russia's potential to change its attitudes toward other ex-Soviet republics regardless of who is in power in the Kremlin. The "postimperial trauma affects all our feelings about Russians and Russian politicians," Taras Berezovets, a Ukrainian political analyst who is now a military officer, told RFE/RL early in 2021.
Not Just Putin's War
The Oscar for the Navalny documentary also rankled Ukrainians who charge that many in the West seek to pin all the blame for Russia's aggression on Putin himself, when they see responsibility as spreading far beyond the president.
Myroslava Barchuk, an acclaimed Ukrainian journalist and vice president of PEN Ukraine, said on her blog the award decision proves that "for the multinational global film industry, this is Putin's war, not Russia's war" -- an approach that effectively absolves most Russians of responsibility and guilt.
"There are some 'other' (real, individual) Russians who are simply victims. They should not only not be canceled, but rewarded and honored, even despite the uncomfortable stories of 'Crimean sandwiches,'" she wrote.
This sense of misplacement of emphasis was further exacerbated by the fact that the Navalny film prevailed in a category that also included A House Made Of Splinters, a highly acclaimed documentary co-produced by Denmark, Ukraine, Sweden, and Finland telling the story of children from an orphanage in Lysychansk, in eastern Ukraine, whose families were torn apart or degraded because of war in the Donbas that erupted in 2014.
The assistant director and line producer of A House Made Of Splinters, Azad Safarov, did not hide his disappointment after the Oscars ceremony, and said the film about the Donbas should have won.
"But…we got proof once again that Russian propaganda works very well and knows how to promote pseudo-heroes where there are no heroes," he said.
Similar sentiments became apparent in the way images of Navalny's wife, daughter, and son celebrating in Los Angeles, juxtaposed with images of the brutal reality of everyday life in wartime Ukraine, flooded social media.
Outside Politics?
With the war's outcome uncertain more than a year after the large-scale invasion, maintaining the support of the United States and the West is a major priority for Ukraine, and the award for the Navalny film was not the only aspect of this year's Oscars that raised hackles in Kyiv.
For the second time, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences reportedly rejected a request from Zelenskiy to speak during the ceremony. Ukrainian officials panned that decision.
WATCH: The director of the documentary about jailed Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny reveals how he shot his Oscar-winning film.
"If Oscar is outside of politics, how should we understand the documentary manifesto Navalny, where internal Russian politics is overflowing?" presidential adviser Mykhaylo Podolyak asked. "If Oscar is out of the context of the war in Ukraine and the mass genocide of Ukrainians, why do you constantly talk about humanism and justice?"
Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told the German magazine Bild that giving the Best International Feature Film award to the anti-war movie All Quiet On The Western Front, and at the same time not letting a president "who is leading the country fighting the biggest war in Europe since World War II" speak at the ceremony was "ridiculous" and "hypocritical."
Meanwhile, Oleksandr Rodnyanskiy, a Ukrainian film producer and a member of the academy, told RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service that outrage on the part of Ukrainians is largely the result of a misunderstanding.
Rodnyanskiy said that in the 95 years of the existence of the Oscars ceremony, "not a single politician who was not linked with the movie that won an Oscar or was at least nominated" has given a speech, and that the academy "did not want to create a precedent."
For most academy members, the vote for the Navalny film reflected condemnation of the "repressions by the totalitarian regime inside [Russia] and of [its] war crimes in Ukraine," he said, adding: "Hollywood is one of the biggest promoters of the idea of supporting Ukraine."
